One or Many Planes: The Composition of Intervals in Painting and Film

Abstract

Readers of Andre Bazin and Jean Mitry may recognize in Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema books a reworking of their already well-established theories on the impression of reality in long sequence and deep-focus shots. For Bazin and Mitry, the deep-focus shot represented a leap beyond the analytic fragmentation of action that characterized earlier forms of montage. Deep focus allowed for a more realistic presentation of events as they occurred. Mitry described this as a change from ‘actualization’ to ‘presentification’. In the classical forms of montage that precede Orson Welles ‘we participate in a represented past, rather than a present actuality...what we are viewing is the consequence of an action.’1 In the deep-focus shot, on the other hand, we witness the development of action and the open time in which this takes place. Bazin’s argument rested on a belief in film’s direct photographic/indexical relation to reality, which he understood to be a part of a movement toward a more perfect analogical presentation of the world in a ‘total cinema’.